Once again I find myself enjoying a game that seemingly almost everybody hates, it happened with Sonic06, it happened with Soldier Of Fortuneayback, it happened with Blacksite Area 51, and now it's happening with this game. I'm a little over half-way through thie game and so far i'm really digging it(I should mention that I have not played the first two Juarez games, so I won't be comparing thme to this game obviously) Fortunately I haven't encountered any of the "major glitches" that i've heard most reviewers complaining about.

The presentation is top-notch, the graphics might not compare to games like Crysis 2, but they certainly get the job done well enough(the opening level in Sequioa Naitonal Park looks especially nice), and the levels are pretty big and expansive, so much so that it's easy to get lost at times. The voice acting is pretty decent, though during the levels, your characters and the enemies only seem to have a handful of lines, and it gets tiresome hearing them repeated after awhile, and the script admittedly does sorta overdo it on the swearing, (though like i've said before, that sort of thing dosen't really bother me much). The story is just OK, it's not groundbreaking and if you've seen enough B-action movies, it's not too hard to guess the plot twists, (the game apparently has four different endings, though in order to get the good one you have to be playing as Ben, right now i'm playing as Kim) also the characters are fairly one-dimensional, but they still manage to be interesting in spite of that.

The gameplay for the most part is pretty well-done, unlike most shooters, your team-mates are actually quite competent and will help you quite a bit(it also helps that they're pretty much invincible), difficulty is about average, the enemies aren't the smartest, but they make up for it with sheer numbers, so you do have to be careful at times. There's some familar elements like regenerating health and bullet-time(here it's called concentration time), there's also breaching sections quite similar to Modern Warfare 2, those are at least incorporated well. You can also do secret objectives for each character to level up and unlock more weapons(though you have to avoid being caught by the other characters). Not so well done are the hand-to-hand combat sections, which feel rather clunky but are thankfully short, the driving sections are also a bit akward, as the controls can be overly sensitive, though the section with my character riding shotgun and blasting enemies nonstop during a high-speed car chase on a freeway was by far the best part of the game. I can't wait to see what this game throws at me next!

I think you should, Cartel is at the very least worth a rental, it's certainly a refreshing change of space from all the futuristic sci-fi FPS games(BTW do we REALLY three more Halo games? that just reeks of laziness to me) flooding the market nowadays.